029 A General Overview of How Senses Work

In this video, Leslie explains the general mechanism of how senses work.

Enjoy!

Transcript of Today’s Episode

Hello and welcome to another episode on Interactive Biology TV, where we’re making biology fun! My name is Leslie Samuel. In this episode, Episode 29, I’m going to be giving a general overview of how senses work. So let’s get right into it.

We all know about the 5 senses. We have the sense of taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. I’m going to get into some more details, specifically with hearing and sight in future episodes, but for today, I just want to give a framework on which we’re going to base what we’re going to be talking about in the future episodes. So this is how senses work.

We’re going to start with receptors, and these receptors are going to get stimulated. When they are stimulated, they’re going to send signals to the brain. When the brain receives those signals, the brain is going to interpret the signals, and it’s basically going to tell you what the senses are. So if you smell a perfume, it’s because the receptors are stimulated, sending signals to the brain, and the brain interprets that as a beautiful scent or an aromatic scent or however you want to call that. So once again, the receptors get stimulated, signals get sent to the brain, and then the brain interprets those signals.

Let’s look specifically at how this happens in the eye. In the eye, we have the retina. In the retina, we have receptors that we call rods and cones. You can see these receptors right here. When those receptors get stimulated, they’re going to cause a signal that goes via a number of different types of cells, and then it goes via a nerve to the brain. Then the brain is going to interpret that, and you’re going to see the person that’s standing in front of you or whatever it is you’re looking at. You’re going to see that as a result of receptors getting stimulated over here, and then you have a nerve that sends a signal to the brain, and then the brain interprets that signal.

This is the same process for touch. This is the same process for smell and the other senses. Receptors get stimulated, and then that sends signals to the brain, and the brain interprets that signal. That’s really all I want to talk about in this video. It’s not a lot of detail, but trust me, we’re going to start filling in those details in later episodes. We’re going to talk specifically about vision and hearing. That’s it for this video, and I’ll see you in the next one.